Mayo 11, 2007

First up is “mythbusters” on discovery channel and ang kwela ng show na ito, i might have blogged about this before but what the heck. This week, they tested if you can paint a room using just a paint can with an explosive charge dipped in it! Based on an episode of mr. Bean where he also used a bucket of paint and a firecracker to paint his room and a poor chap was caught in the crossfire (hahaha).

Back to mythbusters, i get to see stuff that i dont see everyday on discovery channel or anywhere else like blowing up stuff like cement trucks, doing stress tests, etc. To know if a myth is true or not While doing it in a funny way. Basta panonrin nyo at para may matutunan kayo.

And this next show that i wanna talk about, i came across it just the other night. “A night with an angel”, a reality show over at rpn 9. You have this government employee dude wanting to date Angel Locsin within 30 days without prior connections to anybody close to Angel. First of all, the producer might have plans to contact Angel in advance before the 30 days of this guy is up or secondly, if the producer will not be involved in this man’s quest, just documenting it. GOOD LUCK! We are talking about a celebrity here that is super busy and is one of the top celebs locally. And dapat matagal mo nang kilala si angel or nanalo ka sa fanatxt ng Gma. In short, you cannot date a celeb in that timeframe! Mga isang taon na naguusap kayo about stuff and knowing you personally, then mag date kayo!

Before i continue, “mythbusters” is on every thursdays 9pm to 10pm. And “A night with an angel” also thursdays at 10:30pm to 11pm.

Im here now at megamall and i finally got the built-in email client on my phone to send and receive emails from my gmail account without the use of the java app they offer. The advantage of using the builtin client on my phone is that i can view messages offline and more importantly, send attachments for mobile upload to photobucket. Here is an example now:

I have Calibrated my Monitor Using the Adobe Gamma sa Control Panel ng Windows and some test patterns. Mas gumanda ang pictures sa Monitor ko. And im not using an expensive LCD monitor but those Cheap monitors. Try it.

Also, ang daming nangyari this week. The Julia Campbell incident, The Virginia Tech
University Mass Murder by that Psycho dude (i feel sorry for that guy and i give my
condolences to the family and friends of the ones who perished in the incident), Gringo
Honasan Bailed his way out of jail, French Elections (which why i even care???), so on and
so forth na nakalimutan ko na. I will not expound on these topics since they are better
covered by other bloggers or the mainstream media.

Ito na muna ang unang topic of interest ko, Alec Baldwin’s Insulting Voicemail message to
her beautiful 11-year-old daugther na nailabas sa internet and was even played back in its
entirity (sans profanity) on CNN. My question is, why did the message “leaked” out in the
wild, c’mon that is a voicemail message and unless inilabas ng asawa…este ex-asawa over
custody rights or galit ang anak so inilabas iyon, hindi sya madaling ma-hack ng iba. Oh i
take it back, Paris “Sl*T” Hilton’s phone account was hacked easily. Bottom Line, this is
what you get for divorce darn it!

Sugapa talaga sa “campaigning” or what i wanted to call it “promotion” yung mga local
candidates namin sa area of responsibility ko (Congressman, Mayor down to the councilors).
I don’t even hear from the opposition or there is no opposition. Yesterday, i saw in
action in bright day light, some teenagers tieing up a political ad for a councilor at the
back of a house without permission from the owner. Sarap sunugin yung ad noong kandidato na iyon. From a first time voter’s perspective, im excited to vote but i have told you that baka hindi na ako makaboto due to some other reasons that i might not post here in this site due to other reasons nga.

And forget MP3, go AAC instead. Especially consider the HE-AAC variant (also called AAC+) which on my tests, sounds like 128kbit MP3 on only 48 Kbit HE-AAC. WMA claiming “CD quality” at 64 kbits is a joke pero ang HE-AAC is not kidding at the claim of CD quality at 64 kbits and even lower. Tested it at 32 kbits and still sounded fine, lower than that you sacrifice high frequency quality.

Kanina, i tried to defrag my hard drive since its six months since i had the fresh install of Windows XP and ang tagal! I almost finsished watching the movie “Employee of the Month” at hindi parin tapos yung defrag and im not using the built in defrag tool in Windows but a sysinternals tool “Contig”. My Advice, unless you really need disk speed like in video capture where you dont want to drop frames. Reformat and Reinstall Windows if you feel its slow, or watch your system tray and see some 10+ programs running and taking your 256MB of RAM thats slowing you down. Padagdag ko lang, pet peeve ko lang sa mga nagbebenta ng PC na Bnew na Dual-Core na PC nga from intel those core 2 duo’s pero 256MB lang ng RAM ang inilalagay and small HDD (i have no prob with small 80GB HDD, but the speed?). WHAT???

While blog surfing on this hot and boring afternoon, i came across this blog posting:

Well, i watch PBB season 2 on an on-off basis and hindi ako obliged sa sarili ko to react and blog about it, but this topic will. I read on http://www.retzwerx.com that yung BB ng Slovenia kukuha ng isa sa PBB housemates and he/she will live there for a week and merong taga Slovenia na dito sa Pinas mag stay sa BB, same deal.

Abril 5, 2007

I have used the Live Bookmarks Feature in my Firefox Browser but everytime i start up the browser, It takes over my dial-up connection. I Guess (or im right) that it gets its feeds the moment i start-up and i have a lot of feeds so it takes time, like 5 mins before i can browse “properly”.

Anyways, looking for a solution and i have tried different firefox add-ons for RSS feed reading but i did not like them. The good RSS readers that is a stand-alone program all pretty much shareware (Piracy anybody?). so i found out Google Reader and i like it!

What i like about it is that it can show me only the updated feeds and hide them if nothing is new. Also it updates realtime if im reading an article then a new item shows up in a separate feed, i see it.

What bugs me for now is the feeds im reading, the local blogs are generous in the number of updates on their website like 1 to 5 new items. But on foreign tech news sites, 15 to 50 items! I cant read all of those! I want a feed (or a website) that just compiles news and not opinions or digg-estque material (oh, im subscribed to digg.).

Did i already mentioned that i turned off image loading in firefox but with a help of an add-on that will enable image loading on a page to page basis (for those forums which they posts pictures, i will allow them to load images) or when i see something that i might be interested in looking at, right click on the image placeholder and select “load image” and it loads!

Recently, i ran out of ink on my printer and i went to Ink Man in one of the malls and they charged me 250 pesos (which i find cheap) for a colored ink cartridge refill, i did not bother refilling the black ink cartridge since it can print text on color alone and it also costs 250 pesos to refill. I still get good quality prints out of the refill.

Marso 17, 2007

Kanina sa Eat Bulaga, they have credited the woman in the audience who popularized the “taktak” on TV and with the help of Joey de Leon, it took off. They are trying to 1up “Boom Tarat Tarat”, by the way.

Buti naman at hindi nila kinalimutan sya, i actually asked myself what did happen to her, where are the royalties and the attention. Ayun na nga, parang binayaran na sya ng royalty in the form of a sari-sari store and i think there is money involved backstage (hindi na nga lang sinabi, baka lang ha!)

Do you know what, i find the “umaalog-alog-alog” song that Willie sings before going to the games on Wowowee, for the old people and merong double meaning (the t*ts the chorus is refering to)

*Bias ends here*

More and more i browse wikipedia and i help add and correct Philippine based articles recently. Dati nga, nasabi ko na mahilig ako sa youtube (not the NSFW material) pero sa bahay eh Dial-up lang (which in my all atempts to speed it up just a bit by making it more responsive, dial-up parin eh.)

Then, i look at my RSS feeds of other peoples blogs, forum postings (i wont mention on where and what topics, thank you) and news.google.com

I browse late at night on fridays and sometimes sundays to take advantage of free dial-up

What’s yours?

Now, im excited at ABS-CBN’s effort of Broadcasting its shows in Digital. Sabihin ko lang na ang pangit ng reception ng Ch.2 dito but just move into my neighbor and malinaw sya. Digital will fix this. Also it will bring HDTV if they opt for it, i saw HDTV demos already (remember my post of Blu-ray from PS3) and i would like to see local shows in HD. Lalabas na ang totoo kung maganda nga ba ang artista sa TV or hindi (hahaha).

If you have seen the pirated DVD of “Jumong” from carriedo already, you might have noticed the screen bug which said “MBCHD”. MBC (Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation) made jumong and its in HD originally, the pirated is an HD-rip and if only GMA-7 is in HDTV already, they can show jumong in HD!

also have you noticed that Princess hours on ABS-CBN is in letterbox form? Why? Maybe its in HD originally and whoever made it in Korea did not want it to be pan&scanned to fit our square, 4:3 tv’s.

American Shows in studio 23 are also available in HD if studio 23 were in HD.

Next post, i will discuss the cost of Digital or HDTV and my criticisms on current NTSC (the analog that we all use right now) broadcasts.

Now to Windows Vista Naman tayo, in “ultimate”, there is this feature called “Dreamscene” which it allows you to use videos as wallpapers with *no performance penalty* since its part of Aero and its GPU accelerated. Well, matagal ko nang alam na Windows Xp pa iyan pwedeng gawin but using some obscure player. Now I found out how using VLC Media Player which i have installed and i don’t know na pwede pala iyon, until i researched how to do it.

And i have the thing working, problem is. There is still the VLC Media Player on my taskbar and i want it to

1.) Start-up everytime i boot up.
2.) Hide VLC
3.) Use less CPU cycles and Memory as possible.
4.) Loop the video since it stops when it reaches the end.

Now this time, its up to me to solve it and i did. how?

1.) To hide the interface window. Under the Preferences -> Interface -> Main Interfaces -> wxWidgets. Click on the Systray Icon option. Then when you restart VLC, you should see the system tray icon for it. Right-click and select “Show/Hide Interface”.

2.) To Loop the video(s), let VLC start-up on Boot & save some System resources. First, Create a playlist of the video(s) you want to use and save the playlist. Then, create a batch file like this:

Start C:\Progra~1\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe “(the place where you saved the playlist)” –no-audio –one-instance -L

Save it as a batch file and place it in the “startup” folder in the start menu.

Now everytime you Boot windows, you will see you videos as Desktop wallpaper. And on my PC, an MPEG-1 File playing back took like 2% of my CPU and 8 to 12 MB of RAM. I believe that the GPU is doing all the decoding.

Pebrero 27, 2007

I already bought CD-R king branded headset (headphone with a mic sticking out of it) for only 75 pesos, it works fine for me, the mic is good a picking up my voice but the loudness of the speakers is kinda weak.

And then i plan to get the 150 peso headphone that looks like what the DJ’s use in radio, since my earphones included in my MP3 player (a “Creative”) can’t block sound from outside without rendering me deaf. I have read reviews, they say its ok but i haven’t auditioned it. I have a classmate ho has these headphones pero nakalimutan kong mag-ask to try it out.

And then they sell PC accessories on the cheap, yet they are durable, example noong wala pa akong Sariling PC and relied on my suking PC rental shop (which the internet connection is fast, they maintain the PC’s and away from Noisy kids cussing at each other, grabe ang bata pa talaga nila.) they use CD-R king optical mice and they work.

Kanina sa free time ko, youtube nanaman ako and two hours ako nanood, did not read news or any other thing. Sa dami eh i forgot most the good stuff i wanted to share. The videos that amazed me are the Swiss Fighter Plane Pilots who fly low in the swiss alps, The First official Apple Iphone TV commercial Aired at the oscars (Ang galing talagang mang-ingit ng Apple, the music and concept is nice.), Old PC and Game Console Commercials & 3000 students watching a guy break-up with his Girlfriend on Valentines Day (It’s like watching Jerry Springer! A must see. but be warned, explicit language.)

I was listening to internet radio and then when i stumbled upon this AAC stream at 24 kbits, i opened it up in foobar2000 and the sound is way better than WMA streaming at the same bitrate!

Curious of the AAC format, i downloaded the Free Nero Digital AAC encoder (command line utility, No Nero Suite Required) and played with it. At 128 kbits, kinda sounds better than MP3 at the same bitrate, but at lower bit rates, Better than MP3 or WMA and about the same as Ogg Vorbis. Sana hindi lang MP3 ang available to download and my audio player supports the AAC or even the Ogg Vorbis format

Disyembre 28, 2006

The 2nd day, i need to go the comelec office (again) to register after
getting my birth certificate copy. My goodness, the lines were very long.
Longer than “Enteng Kabisote 3″‘s line at the box office (i bet they are that
long at SM cinemas). And it’s hot and there is no order. Went there at
around 1:30 PM, was out 4:45 PM. I was there standing in line and with not
enough chairs around. Babalik pa ako bukas (nanaman!) for the Picture and
biometrics. sana umaga lang ako doon, hindi aabutan ng hapon.

I have pimped my desktop after being tired of the “Luna” blue theme, the one
that comes on Windows XP by default. I switched first to the Vista Theme
that i downloaded on the net, it was soooo fake, i did not like it, wala yung
aero glass eh! saka XP ang ginagamit ko, not vista (same dislike goes to the
people with Nokia 3210’s that uses the x-press on covers to make their phones
look something like the later models!). Then i switched to the Zune theme
which Microsoft provided, i liked it. Then, i found this piece of software
called “objectdock” which “emulates” the MAC OS X Dock. I liked it since it
can replace my desktop, but not my windows taskbar which i placed on top and
“auto-hidden”. After that, i have this software called “wallmaster” which
changes wallpapers every n number of minutes, it had an option to hide all
desktop icons. Then i turned it on and ang linis ng desktop ko. Take a
look:

(Click Image for a more complete view)

CD-R king, the place to go for cheap CD-R/RW’s, DVD-+R/RW’s, PC accessories
and even Digital Cameras!. they started offering this 5,000+ peso Digicam
that records video in MPEG-4 (it said on the box) and saves into SD cards. I
have read and heard on the internet that these taiwan made cameras leaves a
lot to be desired, sub-par image and video quality, interpolated megapixels
(Example: one camera boasts 12 megapixels, closer inspection in the box
revealed only a 3.2 MP CMOS sensor. Yun lang ang importante.).

Tip: Even if your PC is still stuck in the pentium 3/AMD Athlon [Not Xp or 64] Era. Add memory, memory is cheap and the end result is a smoother operation of windows because it will not use a page file on the hard drive to act as additional memory, and hard drives are way slower than RAM. Before i had my own PC, i’m using a 2.0 ghz AMD Sempron with 256 MB of RAM, sure it does transcode MP3’s fast, plays 720p WMV High-def files with some hiccups but when i open up Firefox and a bunch of apps on their sucker, there is always a slight pause. But on my 1.0 ghz AMD athlon machine with 320 MB of RAM, smooth operation.

The “Pepsi 349 Number Fever” Promotion way back in 1992, i was still a little boy then and have no idea what in the world it is, until i saw a program on TV with a feature on this very incident and recently on the back issue of “PC Plus” which i bought at “Book sale” recently. For the uninitiated, Pepsi back in 1992 is losing the cola market share to coca-cola, so they have this promotion where you can win PHP 100 to PHP 1 Million when the number is drawn and you have a crown with that number, you win the prize. For some darn computer bug reason. The computer drawn “349” as the winning number but it had more than 500,000 crowns with it instead of the expected 18 crowns, worse. It’s the 1 million peso prize, do the math and pepsi would be history if it would pay up each of the people 1 mil! Until now, the people are fighting for the prize. Kung mangyari kaya ulit iyon? sana nga para mabawasan na ang raffle draws, especially na puro text promos na which is ran by computers. Recently, pepsi had a text raffle to win a cellphone every hour, nah! Hindi ako nanalo!

Huwag na tayong aasa sa raffle, same goes to lotto, sweepstakes and “las vegas” if you go to the casinos. Let’s work nalang if you need or want the stuff, now if you find these “game of chances” fun, hinay-hinay lang and huwag gastusin lahat ng pera para sa jackpot ok!